New ULA rocket on target for launch to moon Monday

CAPE CANAVERAL SPACE FORCE STATION, Fla. – A NASA news conference held Thursday morning precedes a lunar lander launch scheduled next week at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station.

United Launch Alliance hopes to get the inaugural mission of its Vulcan Centaur rocket off the ground at 2:18 a.m. Monday, Jan. 8.

“We are really excited to start this new American adventure on the moon,” NASA Commercial Lunar Payload Services program manager Chris Culbert said. “Under the Artemis umbrella, robotic spacecraft will conduct important scientific studies preceding and in parallel with exploration by astronauts at the lunar south pole.”

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The Vulcan is set to replace ULA’s Atlas and Delta rockets. Its first certification mission, CERT-1, seeks to carry Astrobotic’s Peregrine lunar lander from Launch Complex 41 to the surface of the moon, having it touch down somewhere in the celestial body’s northern area in late February. It’s an exercise meant to advance NASA’s research and bolster its exploration capabilities before getting people back on the moon before 2030.

“Three of our instruments will collect data on lunar volatiles using different techniques,” Paul Niles, also with NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services said. “Two instruments will provide perspectives on the radiation environment at the lunar surface helping us better prepare to send crewed missions back to the moon.”

A United Launch Alliance (ULA) Vulcan VC2S rocket will launch the first certification mission from Space Launch Complex-41 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida. The Cert-1 flight test includes two payloads. The first is the Peregrine Lunar Lander, Peregrine Mission One (PM1) for Astrobotic as part of NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) initiative to deliver science and technology to the lunar surface. The second payload is the Celestis Memorial Spaceflights deep space Voyager mission known as the Enterprise Flight.

VULCAN TO LAUNCH FIRST CERTIFICATION MISSION (CERT-1) (ulalaunch.com)

The launch had originally targeted Christmas Eve 2023. This followed a delay after the upper stage of a Centaur exploded that March during testing at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama. A hydrogen leak was blamed, said to have caused a crack in the launch vehicle’s 18-foot-in-diameter tank.

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